dinkum

it's been a long week here in australia; from sahtIhdai to sahtIhdai as my newly ausified wife says, but i declare the dinkum here fair.

i'd love to write a nice long bloggy but we're on a dial-up and i need to go and get poked and prodded by the australian government so this will just be a brief highlighty thing.

1) we're here.
2) it's good to be here.
3) it's been over 30 degrees (dah-greys) here twice this week, which is freakin' hot.
4) it is darn near impossible to get a mobile phone in this country, but we have achieved cellular status. bartlebee only with the help OF HER MOTHER if you can believe that.
5) we're crashing with friend Jim but have already applied for a terrace house in Brunswick which we may or may not get depending on if they trust our "foreign and strange" credit history more than the mobile phone guys. brunswick is about 2km from the city center, on a tram line and looks like a good spot to land.
6) i'm turning in my residency application today after my medical exam. this is quite stressful as the fee is $1990 + $297 and it is non-refundable. also, i have needed to cull together a simply recockulous tome of paperwork proving that i exist and should exist in australia.
7) i like it here. melbourne is interesting and full of things to do. the weather is up and down but it is not set to subarctic-blast with a wellingtonian regularity.
8) i can still understand 90% of what my wife says.

hopefully we'll get this house and then we'll have an address and dsl and the dinkum will be even fairer. the fairest dinkum.

oh yeah. i saw three kangaroos yesterday and only one of them was dead.